Large furniture pieces like club chairs, sofas, loveseats and such can benefit greatly from the ability to ship the furniture piece partially unassembled to allow the separated components to be nested tightly together and to ship in a much smaller carton than if it is assembled. There would be substantial cost savings in being able to ship almost twice as many units of furniture in a standard shipping container, both in shipping and in storage costs. Another advantage for single chairs would be the use of a smaller carton having the ability, over fully assembled pieces, to ship whole units by standard rate bulk-shipping methods at a much lower cost. This would be especially desirable to furniture retailers who are selling furniture primarily through catalogs or internet sites and are regularly shipping furniture over long distances. The furniture can then be assembled by the furniture manufacturer, the dealer or retail establishment and in some cases by the consumer in their home or place of business.
An additional benefit of separating the components is the cost savings associated with applying upholstery to several smaller pieces as opposed to upholstering whole assembled frames which require more hours to produce, higher skilled labor and large specialized work tables to facilitate handling and repositioning of the heavy frames. In the case where part of a piece of furniture is damaged, for whatever reason, the smaller separate components could be replaced as needed at a much lower cost to produce and ship.
The prior art for ready-to-assembly (“RTA”) systems as described have several problems which make the systems either hard for the furniture manufacturers to assemble the separate components or hard for the technicians and the consumers to perform the final assembly of the furniture pieces. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,932,720 and 5,069,506 describe systems that use screws or nuts and bolts to perform the final assembly process of the upholstered frame sub-assemblies by the consumer or field technician. These systems require hand tools and a basic knowledge of furniture assembly and the fasteners can be difficult to align and secure. When the fastener's threads are not aligned properly, either through the fault of the factory or the assembler, the metal fasteners can be very difficult to engage and possibly become “cross-threaded” which would render them inoperable. If the mechanical fasteners are not tightened properly the frames can be loose and unstable.
In addition, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,265,939 and 6,715,837 use sliding sheet metal brackets that attach to the surface of the frame material with screws and the entire shear load placed on the connectors is carried by the screws as is also the case with other conventional connectors. These screws are hard to align through the upholstery fabrics during the manufacturing process and the sheet metal material has sharp edges that can damage the softer upholstery fabrics during shipping, storage and during the final assembly process by the consumer.
Both U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,601,340 and 5,709,500 additionally require the installation of separate locking pins that can be difficult to align and the pins are not attached to the frames so they can be lost or damaged during shipping, leading to costly returns or delays.